Junior Secondary (S1 – S3)

The Junior Secondary Program recaps all grammar content taught up to this point, strengthens grammar foundations, and teaches students to acquire advanced grammar skills.  Students are required to use academic languages to complete assigned topic-specific writing tasks.  They will need to apply Critical Questioning and Thinking to strengthen their generating of ideas and content, and elaborate on their arguments at a more sophisticated level.

Junior secondary students, like those at all levels, will improve on their reasoning and logic, proofreading, and reading and presentation skills to prepare themselves for the Senior Secondary Program. These courses will also center on the applications of English literacy skills acquired in class.

Grammar

Advanced grammar will avoid the common pitfalls found in English, such as perfect and conditional tenses.  Students learn to adapt formality and grammar to the appropriate situation or context of their writing. There is a focus on the muddling of prepositions for junior secondary students.

Writing and Logical Reasoning

This component covers the advanced techniques of composing persuasive essays, descriptive essays, compare-and-contrast essays, and creative writings.  Besides, students will learn to employ academic language to deliver sophisticated claims succinctly and logically; they will learn to establish a main idea or argument, devise supporting evidence for their arguments, draw conclusions, and develop the ability to paraphrase as well as summarize. Learning to read their own works critically, with advanced proofreading techniques, as well as acquiring basic varying sentence techniques, such as beginning sentences with a variety of phrases, are necessary at this stage. 

Reading Comprehension and Oral Presentation

Improving on reading skills—locating the main ideas, understanding the text both on the literal and metaphorical levels, building vocabulary from context clues—continues to be one of the chief focuses during this stage of English literacy acquisition. Exposure to classic English Literature, such as the works of Alice Munro, Maya Angelo, William Shakespeare, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, and Salman Rushdie, and to a wide range of news and articles from The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, and The Global and Mail will help build critical analytical skills and a vocabulary.

Students will construct imaginative dialogues for plays or picture books to stimulate creative and critical thinking, and will be given the opportunity to present their ideas in front of a small, encouraging group.

The learning atmosphere is relaxed, too, intended to cultivate the love of English, building good reading habits and gaining confidence in writing and speaking English.